Someone must have set up a webcam to capture the impending failure?
Arecibo Observatory Collapsed
161–170 of 337 posts
Re: Arecibo Observatory Collapsed
#162Great! Now they can replace it with something new instead of trying to salvage outdated equipment, software and engineers!
Is there still a use case for a new dish built into the same natural bowl? Why not build somewhere else? If there had never been an Arecibo at that location would someone actually pick it today to site a new scope? Not trying to diss all that has been accomplished with Arecibo just wonder if there are not better places to direct funding, assuming it can be found.
Re: Arecibo Observatory Collapsed
#163"Too big to fail" apparently doesn't apply for science projects. To put this in perspective, at the cost of a single F-35A, Arecibo could be running for ~7y with funding at 2011 levels.
I mean, this sounds nice and all, but it is CLEARLY false James Webb Space Telescope: Proposed Budget: $500 mil Current Budget: $10 Billion Space Launch System Current Budget: $20 billion ITER: Proposed Budget : 22 Billion Euro Current Proposed Budget: 64 Billion Euro There are lots of science projects that are funded. Some of them just get more attention than others
No, it's right.
> James Webb Space Telescope: Proposed Budget: $500 mil Current Budget: $10 Billion
That is over 40 years! Almost 30 years to build it and 10 years to operate it. That's $250 million per year.
> Space Launch System Current Budget: $20 billion
SLS is not a science program.
> ITER: Proposed Budget : 22 Billion Euro Current Proposed Budget: 64 Billion Euro
The proposed budget is 22 billion, not 64. That's for almost 40 years of construction and 20 years of operation. So we're talking 60 years of funding. Think about that, this is something that could revolutionize everything! Save the planet too. We're spending 360 million per year or so on it. That's absurd.
There are a few big science projects, and even they get very modest funding.
Let us put the F-35 into context. It will cost 1.7 trillion dollars for 55 years. That's an insane amount of money, 30 billion per year. https://www.stripes.com/news/us/pentagon-reportedly-estimate...
We fund science, which improves our lives and saves us from pandemics, at a pittance, and fund insane programs to bomb poor people at crazy levels.
Re: Arecibo Observatory Collapsed
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
The FTE employee-count alone underestimates the impact of national-scale science infrastructure. naic.edu is down right now (I suspect they're busy at the moment), but their data is used by tens to hundreds of institutions, each partially employing faculty, postdocs, and students. For agencies like NSF, the science is sometimes almost secondary. What matters perhaps the most is that qualified and capable students con…
> China's larger modern copy of Arecibo (FAST) come on-line in 2016 China's is not really a copy. It does not have transmit capability. What is really missing now in US, and international science is asteroid radar imaging and ranging.
That is not good. Was Arecibo the best instrument for early detection of asteroids? What are we using now?
Re: Arecibo Observatory Collapsed
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps Lockheed should make a telescope that’s so big, it spans 45 States?
How spread out can the receivers in a Very Very Large Array be? My understanding is that with radiotelescopy they can be widely dispersed, but I'm far from an expert. Really, you just need manufacturing/contractors in many places. This part built in Pennsylvania, that one in Michigan.
VLBI arrays [1] are networks of radio telescopes that combine data from multiple instruments spread out over a continent or the whole planet. A network like this emulates a continent-size or a planet-size radio telescope and produces radioastronomy's highest resolution images.
The most sensitive VLBI array is the European VLBI network [2] which spans the sort of scales you have in mind.
A VLBI array can also incorporate space-based nodes, see e.g. [3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very-long-baseline_interferome...
Re: Arecibo Observatory Collapsed
#166What a sad day for our species. John Michael Godier made an interesting interview with Saptarshi Bandyopadhyay regarding placing a radio telescope on the far (silent) side of Moon. Notably, our moon is also obviously devoid of the ionosphere, but what is less obvious, is that this would allow us to observe wavelengths that have so far never been studied by humans. https://youtu.be/8c8tG1sAK78
Additional benefit to moon telescope: No corroding moisture and wind stress to slowly degrade and eventually collapse it under the weight of 6X more gravity. Downside: Harder to get to if you do need to make repairs.
No wind or moisture but constant bombardment by micrometeorites. Sensitive instruments whacked by bullet-like impacts are notably hard to maintain. You could cover all sensitive systems with Whipple shields or something but that's just more mass to loft and assemble.
Re: Arecibo Observatory Collapsed
#167I've wondered about the exact time of the collapse. Apparently there is a seismic observatory only tens of meters away from the telescope dish. The station code is AOPR [0]. After retrieving the mseed data from the web API using curl, and installing obspy from pip, I could plot the events. This is the result: [1]. You can see two "events". One at Nov 30, 23:12 UTC, and a second, larger one at Dec 1st, 11:52 UTC. Upon…
Any hints on finding seismic data from elsewhere in the world? There was a small event in South America yesterday I'd love to hit with data sciency stuff.
Re: Arecibo Observatory Collapsed
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ultimately, it was old. It wasn’t designed to handle the stresses it experienced, and important things failed. It is possible but far from certain that inspections could have found and fixed cable problems before ultimate failure.
The structure apparently was inspected several years ago and declared sound. I suppose one can always say "more thorough inspections!" but it looks like this was a surprise and would have happened on any reasonable budget.
You can design and inspect things like they were aircraft, but then everything you do is a large multiple more expensive. It’s hard to think of a one of a kind instrument that is an enormous outdoor installation failing after 57 years in operation is an outcome that deserves any blame.
Re: Arecibo Observatory Collapsed
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
> China's larger modern copy of Arecibo (FAST) come on-line in 2016 China's is not really a copy. It does not have transmit capability. What is really missing now in US, and international science is asteroid radar imaging and ranging.
That is not good. Was Arecibo the best instrument for early detection of asteroids? What are we using now?
Now, we use optical scanning telescopes with a wide field of view, and image differencing.
Optical instruments have a wide field of view and don't have the inherent SNR problems that radar does. (I.e., using the Sun to illuminate objects is more efficient than doing it yourself.)
As a side-effect, there are all kinds of other transient sources that these scanning telescopes pick up, like supernovae, relativistic jets from AGNs ("blazars"), exotic variable stars, etc. (http://crts.caltech.edu) It's a zoo out there!
Radar does play a role in orbit characterization, and recovery of object geometry, once the NEO gets close enough. But you can get orbits through optical techniques too.
The NASA center for near-Earth objects (NEOs) is: https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/about/search_program.html
NEO close approaches to Earth, tabulated: https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/ca/. There was a really close one today, actually (a 5-meter object at 0.13 lunar distances).
For more about the role of planetary radar in NEOs, search for "radar" in this FAQ: https://www.nasa.gov/planetarydefense/faq
Re: Arecibo Observatory Collapsed
#170Seems to have collapsed a while ago if James Bond films are anything to go by https://youtu.be/jp9tENRDVzA?t=313
Actually the Bond shot gives a good impression of how big the thing is.